CRAY J90s (aztec, paiute, ouray, chipeta):
1995–2002
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The CRAY J90s series of computers (which included the J90 classic and J90se models) were parallel vector processors from SGI/Cray Research. NCAR acquired two J90 classics (aztec and paiute) in 1995, a J90se (ouray) in 1997, and a second J90se in 1998.
One of the J90s (aztec) was used by the Climate Simulation Laboratory, while the other three (paiute, ouray, and chipeta) were used for general community computing.
The two J90 classics had a scalar and vector processor clock speed of 100 MHz and a peak performance of 200 megaflops per CPU. The two J90ses had a vector processor clock speed of 100 MHz and a scalar processor clock speed of 200 MHz. Even though the J90 classics and J90ses both had a theoretical peak performance of 200 megaflops/CPU, the J90ses gave better delivered performance on typical real world codes because of their fast scalar processors.
Aztec
Aztec, a J90 classic, was installed in the NCAR computing room in May 1995. Aztec started out with 16 processors (each giving a sustained performance of about 60 megaflops), 256 megawords of memory, and 47 gigabytes of disk storage. It was later upgraded to 20 processors and 512 megawords of memory. Aztec had HIPPI connectivity to the Mass Storage System and a peak performance of 3.2 gigaflops under ideal conditions.
Aztec ran the UNICOS operating system and supported the Fortran 77 and C compilers. The machine offered mathematical and statistical software and various vendor-supplied utilities. It was suitable for batch jobs that needed 10–128 megawords of memory, but not recommended for intensive interactive jobs because of insufficient job swapping capabilities.
Aztec was decommissioned on 30 June 2000.
Paiute
Paiute, a second J90 classic, was installed on 16 November 1995. This machine had 16 processors (each giving a sustained performance of about 60 megaflops), 256 megawords of central memory, 72 gigabytes of disk, and a clock period of 10 nanoseconds. Paiute had HIPPI connectivity to the Mass Storage System. It ran the UNICOS operating system and supports the Fortran 77, Fortran 90, C, and Fortran 90 compilers. It offered mathematical and statistical software and various vendor-supplied utilities.
Paiute was suitable for batch jobs that needed 10–128 megawords of memory, but not recommended for intensive interactive jobs because of insufficient job-swapping capabilities.
Paiute was decommissioned on 30 June 2000.
Ouray
Ouray became available to users on 12 May 1997. It had been initially ordered with 20 CPUs, but SGI/Cray offered NCAR an additional 4 CPUs at no cost in compensation for a long and laborious checkout of the system. The additional CPUs were installed in the system on 27 May 1997.
Ouray had 1,024 megawords of memory, 150 gigabytes of disk, a clock period of 10 nanoseconds, HIPPI connectivity to the Mass Storage System, and a sustained performance of about 1.5 gigaflops. It ran the UNICOS operating system and supports Fortran 90, C, and C++ compilers. It offered mathematical and statistical software and many vendor-supplied utilities, including Message Passing Toolkit.
When it was installed, ouray's large memory offered community users the opportunity to run much larger jobs than they could be run before. In fact, it had 16 times as much memory than NCAR's old workhorse, the Y-MP8/864 (shavano). Although its processor speed was about half the speed of a Y-MP processor, it could sustains up to twice the gigaflops as shavano due to its increased number of processors and vastly increased memory.
Ouray was decommissioned on 30 November 2001.
Chipeta
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Chipeta became available on 24 March 1998, supplementing paiute and ouray and increasing the General Accounting Unit (GAU) pool for the general user community by 50%. Named for the "Queen of the Utes" and devoted wife of Chief Ouray, the machine was virtually identical to ouray. It had the same filesystem layout and system software, plus 24 processors, 1,024 megabytes of memory, and a sustained performance of 1.5 gigaflops sustained.
Like ouray, chipeta was good for large-memory jobs and was popular with users from the beginning. During the first week it was available to the community, it was filled to 99% capacity (perhaps because usage was free.
Chipeta was decommissioned on 3 September 2002. As technological trends continued to favor symmetric multiprocessor cluster systems built from relatively inexpensive commodity CPUs, the era of the high-performance vector-processor systems appeared to be ending.